The World; In Africa, West Can Pay Now, Or Later

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

Published: February 26, 1995

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast—
Having struggled across the Sahara, 250,000 starving Sudanese refugees assemble on the Moroccan coast, hoping to cross the Straits of Gibraltar to Europe. As an armada of camera crews film them, the refugee's leader launches this challenge to European Union coastal guards who would stop them: "All we ask of you is, watch us die."

The event is pure fiction, the final scene of a 1990 BBC television drama. But development experts say it neatly illustrates a stark choice looming for the industrialized world: Pitch in more energetically to bring Africa into the global economic fold, or wait and watch as the continent descends into a quickening spiral of disaster.

An Exploding Population

With its population due to double to about 1.2 billion in less than 30 years, and expected to reach 2 billion by 2050, an Africa in crisis could well become the desperate stage for a mass emigration the likes of which have never been seen.

Despite such warnings, however, the West seems to have grown only more indifferent to Africa's fortunes. Some American congressmen have recently likened aid to the continent to throwing money into a rathole; Britain has said it will cut its contributions to Africa through the European Union, and even France is grappling with ways to reduce obligations to its former possessions.

In response, frustrated development experts and new democratic leaders in Africa have argued that would be far cheaper to help the continent out of its problems now than to rescue it later.

To get a sense of scale, it helps to look at two examples where extremely rapid population growth rates -- well over 3 percent a year -- are expected by United Nations statisticians between now and the year 2000. They are Nigeria, which in the early 1990's had 116 million people and a gross national product per capita of only $350, and Kenya, which had 25 million people and produced just $340 per person.

Nevertheless, the experts on Africa recognize that in an era of austerity at home, arguments about investing abroad today to prevent crisis tomorrow have limited appeal. They now argue that traditional aid grants are not necessarily the answer. "The most effective thing that could be done for Africa right now doesn't involve new money, but systematic debt relief," said Thomas Callaghy of the University of Pennsylvania. "You could write off all of Africa's debts tomorrow, and it wouldn't affect international financial markets." But then, "When you look at what has just happened in Mexico you realize just how hard a thing this is to sell politically."

If Africa's approaching peril is not enough to motivate the West to act with greater generosity, many hope that old-fashioned appeals to profit might. Whether it was spices or gold or slaves or vast quantities of gems and minerals, the continent has always been a rich, if risky, El Dorado for the venturesome outsider.

Following Ghana's independence, Kwame Nkrumah, its first president and a pioneer of the continent's ultimately disastrous fling with socialism, defined the historical problem, noting the "paradox" that Africa's "earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below the soil continue to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa's impoverishment."

Now, throughout much of the continent, several years of dramatic efforts to remove barriers to trade and investment, trim bureaucracies and rejoin the global economy have mostly swept away the legacy of three decades of Mr. Nkrumah's brand of socialism. Ghana and Uganda are prominent examples, and investment in South Africa can at last be viewed as an investment in the continent as a whole.

Because of these changes, Africa's riches are again up for grabs. But so far, the international business community has largely disappointed the development experts. Mali, for example, can't find a partner to help finance a new power company, even though companies from the United States, Australia and Canada rush to explore for gold and diamonds and oil there. Their hope is for the kind of quick extraction of wealth that led to the continent's early disenchantment with capitalism.

If Africa still requires a more cooperative form of economic involvement, development experts say, it is because the years under socialism did little to alleviate deep social problems that include an undereducated population whose needs grow faster than weak governments can possibly cope with, poor roads and communications, a lack of managerial expertise, and most of all a shortage of capital.

So Africa is in a bind: major foreign private investment in productive new industries is unlikely unless these problems are solved first, but the only sources of help to fix them is overseas.

"People cling to the myth that if only these countries would get their policies right, everything would be okay," said James Gustave Speth, the administrator of the United Nations Development Program. "There is no reason to believe that Africa can't make it, but right now this is a continent that is bleeding and without substantial outside help, there is no hope."

In addition to cutting debt burden, economists say the West should drop barriers to goods like textiles that are often entry-level transformation industries for developing countries. In this, they say, there could be a payoff for the West as well.

"Aid to Africa is not welfare," J. Brian Atwood, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, wrote recently in The International Herald Tribune. "Africa is today what Latin American and Asian markets were a generation ago. It is the last great developing market." But what many see as a sensible management of long-term interests collides with political expediency. "Putting people on their feet is just good business sense" said Edward V. K. Jaycox, vice president of the World Bank. "But it is a question of old-fashioned industrial structures in the north, where a lot of people are engaged in activities that they are loath to give up." By that he meant something very much like what Mr. Nkrumah used to say: If the West really wants to see an Africa healthy for investment, it should stop raiding the gold veins and diamond mines and open not just its wallets but its markets as well.

Photo: In Nigeria, fuel is sometimes so scarce that drivers must wait in line for days. (Agence France-Presse)